The Conservatives face losing one of their seats in the Commons in a
substantial defeat for the party at a by-election next month, polling
suggests.

The Tories are 22 points behind Labour in the latest survey of voters in Corby, which became vacant after Louise Mensch announced she was resigning as MP to move to America with her family.

The party’s high command may have given up on the contest in order to “conserve resources” for more winnable campaigns in the future, according to Lord Ashcroft, the Tories’ former deputy chairman. The by-election is seen as a key test for David Cameron as it is the first Conservative-held seat that the party has had to defend since the 2010 election.

The constituency of Corby and East Northamptonshire has also been a bellwether with voters backing the winning party at every general election since the seat was first contested 29 years ago.

A poll of 1,500 voters in Corby, conducted on the instructions of Lord Ashcroft, found that Labour was on 54 per cent, 22 points ahead of the Conservatives on 32 per cent. The survey found that half of the Tory voters who are planning to abandon the party in the ballot on Nov 15 were “unhappy about what the Conservatives are doing in government,” Lord Ashcroft said.

Writing on the ConservativeHome website about the findings, he said Labour was also “winning the ground war”, distributing more leaflets, direct mail and more intensively canvassing the area than the Tories.

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The Conservatives may be finding it “hard to recruit volunteers to defend a seat they did so much to win only two years ago”, Lord Ashcroft said. The Tory campaign leadership “may have decided to conserve resources for future campaigns it sees more hope of winning”, he added. “Unfortunately it looks as though Christine Emmett, the excellent Conservative candidate I wrote about meeting at conference in Birmingham, is going to do less well than she deserves.”

A 22-point victory for Ed Miliband would represent a 13-point swing to Labour, enough for a significant overall Commons majority if repeated at the election in 2015. However, the survey suggested that hope remained for the Tories as Mr Cameron and George Osborne were still trusted more than Mr Miliband and Ed Balls on the economy.